


More Scary Stories to Tell in the Agora

by burglebezzlement



Category: Lock In - John Scalzi
Genre: Gen, Ghost Stories, Haden Culture, Swearing, The Agora, Threeps, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 07:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14039535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: Every community has its dark tales, and the Haden community is no exception.Dial down your environmental sensitivities, make sure your threep is fully charged, and settle in for some spooky reading… if you dare!





	More Scary Stories to Tell in the Agora

**Author's Note:**

  * For [luckybarton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/gifts).



> A/N: For those who might not be familiar with canon, this fic can be read with [basic information about the Lock In universe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In). 
> 
> Please note that this fic contains references to autopsies and violence. I would consider the content in question to be less graphic than similar material contained in canon. 
> 
> All Agora handles are fictional. Any resemblance to real handles is purely coincidental.

It’s that time of year again — time for our annual scary stories contest!

This year’s contest is sponsored by Enterprise. The winner of this year’s contest will receive a three-day Personal Transport rental anywhere in the world. Enterprise has Personal Transport rentals available in all major Haden markets, and provides a wide range of makes and models to meet all your needs. When you need a Personal Transport, and it needs to be now — think Enterprise!

As a reminder, all stories should be true stories that happened to you or someone you know. This isn’t r/nothreep.

If you’ve got a story to scare us with, share it in the comments below. And if you don’t have a story, you can help us by voting for your favorites. 

Dial down your environmental sensitivities, make sure your threep is fully charged, and settle in for some spooky reading… if you dare!

 

**Billy Bob’s Used Threep Emporium**  
_@daughterofmargie63_

When this story happened, me and my girlfriend were living in an apartment and sharing one threep for the two of us. It wasn’t that bad at first — my girlfriend works in the Agora, so I could take the threep for work. But it was getting hard, balancing my unpredictable work schedule with feeding and caretaking for both of our bodies. 

Also, it meant we only had one threep to take to family events. My girlfriend’s family is great. Her mom’s Haden, too, so they sometimes hold family events in the Agora, and sometimes in meat space. My family, though? They judge me already for being Haden and a lesbian, and somehow being a _single_ lesbian was worse. One threep meant showing up alone at family gatherings. It was getting to me.

I knew the kind of threep I was probably going to find at Billy Bob’s Used Threep Emporium. I also knew that my cousin Kaylee’s wedding was coming up, and if I had to attend by myself, I wasn’t going to be responsible for my own actions. So I scraped up what money I could and headed on down.

The salesman was delighted to see me, and showed me a few clunky old threeps before showing me to a late-model Sebring-Warner 660. The threep looked great. Suspiciously great, for the price it had stickered across its chest.

There had to be something wrong with it, but when I hopped over for a test run, the thing moved like a dream. 

“Come on,” I said, peeking under the price tag for damage. “I wasn’t born yesterday. What’s wrong with it?”

The salesman smiled. “Nothing at all. It’s month-end. We’re giving you a steal to meet our quota.” He ran his fingers over the threep’s arm. “Like new. Only used by a little old lady who went to church once a week.”

I took another look at the pearl luster finish, and gave in. “Knock another three hundred off and we’ve got a deal.”

It was great at first. Having two threeps made our schedules much easier to coordinate — I could have a threep at work and bounce home to check on our bodies from the home threep.

I did notice that my girlfriend tried to avoid the new threep, though. When I asked her about it, she just said she felt more comfortable in the older model. 

After that, I started noticing it, too. Sometimes the threep wouldn’t respond right away. You’d go to reach out, and the arm would hang, just for a moment. Or sometimes you might get the feeling the arm wanted to move, all on its own. Weird feeling. I kept running self-diagnostics, but they never reported anything wrong.

Then there was the down-time. I’d hop into the threep, and it wouldn’t be quite where I left it. Nothing major — a chair moved a few feet, maybe, or an arm in an uncomfortable position. I knew it wasn’t my girlfriend, since she avoided the new threep. And she and I were the only ones with the codes. 

The final straw was the day I integrated and found myself in the threep, four blocks away from our apartment — with a set of garden shears in my hands.

I walked that threep straight back to the dealership. There was a different salesperson on duty, a woman, and I could swear she went pale when I walked in the door. I told her I was returning the threep under the state’s lemon law, and she didn’t protest at all — even gave me a decent deal on an Ajax 330, a little dented, but it was worth it.

I couldn’t forget the threep, though. Kept nagging at me. Finally, I asked my friend Suresh, who works at the state threep registry, to run the license number for me.

His eyes got wide when the info popped up on his screen. “You’re sure about that number?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“That threep used to belong to Rolf Petersen,” he said. “Also known as the Butcher. He was a mob enforcer. Used to do all their dirty work. He died three months ago.”

Three months ago — right before my former threep turned up at Billy Bob’s Used Threep Emporium. 

What really scares me is the time with the garden shears. What would the threep have done if I hadn’t hopped in and taken control before it could get to its destination?

And what was it doing while we weren’t looking?

 

**Think Twice**  
_@jimthedeathdoctor_

I’m a fill-in medical examiner. Small towns love me — no money for a full time ME? Just lend me a threep and sign the standard agreements, and I’ll do your autopsies on a fill-in basis. 

Of course, most small towns that can’t afford an medical examiner can’t afford nice loaner threeps, either. You get the usual garbage. Old models cast off by Hadens who want to support their town. Garbage threeps confiscated during a case. None of them are maintained properly. I work across three time zones, in a different threep every day, so I’ve gotten pretty good at driving just about anything. I once did an autopsy in a Junior Metro Courier with only three working fingers, because it was urgent — but I digress. 

This time, I’d been called to autopsy an unattended death. Haden — sad, but not rare. It happens. Some Hadens keep their selves so sensory-forward, they don’t notice what’s happening back home. 

So I integrate with the town’s spare threep, and it’s horrible. One of the worst I’ve used — lagging controls, which is _not great_ for doing an autopsy, let me tell you. And the damn thing can’t hold a charge. I’m talking five minutes, tops, before I have to dive for the outlet. 

I consider duct-taping an induction charger to the threep’s ass, but you can’t do an autopsy when you’re stuck to the wall on a four-foot charge cable. So I head into the Sheriff’s office to demand some money for a rental threep.

“You’ve got to have something better,” I say, and her eyes shift. Dodgers — they’re easy to read. She obviously has something. She’s holding out on me. “Come on. Where is it?”

“The threep in question is evidence in this case,” she says.

“So?”

“So you’d be cutting this guy open with his own threep,” she says, bluntly. When I shrug — _so?_ — she sighs. “Look, this one’s weird. We can’t explain the death, and there’s damage to the threep that we think might be linked.”

“Bullshit.” I know everyone’s got that story about their cousin’s third ex-wife’s best friend or whatever, the one who died in a threep and _died in real life_ or whatever, but I’m a ME. I figure I know better. “Just give me access.”

She does, finally, when I tell her the other option is renting me a new threep, full-price, or hiring another ME. The threep’s got a hole in the chest and the left arm’s only semi-functional, but it’s still an improvement.

So I go to perform the autopsy the threep’s former owner, and as soon as I get to the heart, I’m out of my depth. There’s no organic reason why the heart would have this kind of damage — the skin’s unbroken, the body’s otherwise undamaged, it’s just — shredded. Like someone shivved him from the inside, with a weapon that disappeared.

That’s then I look down at the threep’s chest. Back at home, my body shivers, involuntarily. Because the damage on that threep’s chest? It’s exactly what I’m seeing inside the body.

Your cousin’s third ex-wife’s best friend, or whoever? The asshole who claims that damage to a threep can lead to damage to the human body riding it?

That asshole is me.

The next time you’re out in your threep and you think _what’s the worst that can happen?_ — think twice.

 

**One Last Goodbye**  
_@grandknitter_of_three_

This isn’t as spooky as some of the other stories but it was real spooky to me!

When I was a little girl, my best friend Nancy lived next door to me. We lost touch for decades but then we both got Haden’s. We reconnected over the Agora and it was like no time had passed. We were best friends again!

We used to spend time in Nancy’s little house. She paid a programmer to build the house for her in “virtual space.” It looked just like Nancy’s house in real life! It always smelled like baking cookies, because Nancy said smelling with your nose was almost as good as eating with your body.

Nancy sent me an “invite request” one evening to ask me to spend time with her in her little “virtual space” house. I went over and we spent the evening talking just the way we used to, about all the dreams we had as little girls and the life we’d had. 

“I’ve had a good life,” Nancy said at the end, and we hugged. She smelled just like those cookies. “And I’m glad I had a friend like you.”

I sent Nancy a message the next morning, but it was Nancy’s daughter, Carly, who responded. Nancy had passed on two days earlier, of a heart attack. I was shocked! I had spent all that time with Nancy, and she knew everything we had talked about together as girls.

I still don’t know how Nancy was able to invite me to her “virtual space” one last time to say goodbye, but I’m glad she did.

 

**A Light in the Agora**  
_@8585e0_

My friend Sam and I used to go Agora-spelunking.

It has nothing to do with caves. Sam just likes long words. He sends a bot out to explore public areas of the Agora, and find things that don’t come up in any of the search indexes and directories. The spaces are out there, and they’re public — but unless you go looking, you’ll never run across them. 

You can come across some cool stuff. Sometimes the people running the space don’t realize they aren't indexed, in which case Sam usually helps them figure out the issue and get up and running. Sometimes they don’t care — they’re fine if someone like us stumbles across them, but they're more interested in their calculations of how quickly various species of birds could consume a T. Rex.

There’s some interesting stuff out there. _Interesting_.

Agora-spelunking is how we stumbled across the Light of the Agora. 

Eight hours into one of our exploratory runs, we followed the bot’s map down into a neighborhood neither of us had seen before. The entrance to the temple looked like a normal door, like you might find in an apartment building or something, but as soon as we touched the knob, it broke open into a wide passageway, carved out of solid rock. 

We glanced at one another and went in.

The passageway took us down, down, traveling into the ground, the walls narrowing until we had to go single-file. I was starting to feel claustrophobic when we came to a second door. 

A small sign beside the door said guests were welcome, but asked us not to record anything. The space had recording permissions turned off, but of course there's always a way to get around that.

And then the door swung open, and we took an involuntary step back.

The space was massive. A vaulted ceiling rose up into the darkness, carved out of what looked like solid rock. The spaces you find in the Agora can look fake, but this felt real — realer than real. The space was hushed. Silent, still air with the faintest touch of incense. 

At the center of the room was a lamp. A simple shape, geometric, with a flame flickering behind translucent sheets of mica.

We didn’t see the caretaker arrive. The space was empty, and then the caretaker was there, beside us, a robed figure, face hidden under a deep cowl. 

“Travelers,” the figure said, in a voice that could have been any age, any gender. “You are welcome here, but take nothing with you but memories.”

I’m sure you see where this is going.

And really, can you blame me? It was a great lamp, perfect for the relaxation module I was curating in my liminal space. Everything you see in the Agora is just a bunch of rendered files. They all have dimensions. If I happen to be particularly good at scanning those dimensions and remembering those numbers and putting them together in a CAD file later — is that really the same thing as recording? I’ve never thought so.

When Sam and I got back from the run, I mocked up the lamp in CAD. I didn’t sell it — I rarely sell objects. I like being the only one who has them, or in this case, one of the only two. I put it in my relaxation module and moved on with my life.

The bad luck started a few days later, when I got a bad bag of nutritional supplement.

Four days of gastrointestinal distress. I’m sure most people have had the pleasure of getting the stomach flu since being locked in, so I’ll spare you all the details. What I will say is I had to toss the rest of the nutrient supplement and buy more, and the additional caretaker days from the whole incident bumped me up a tier on my nursing services contract, so it ended up being expensive as well as disgusting.

Then the charging issues started. I went through five induction coils and couldn’t get my threep to hold a charge past two hours. I even tried other people’s coils. Their threep charged fine. Mine got two hours.

I work as an architectural consultant, making sure bridges and buildings aren’t about to fall down, so not being able to be away from a charging outlet for more than two hours was getting to be a problem. I dumped my threep off with my repair woman, even though she still swore nothing was wrong with it. There was a convention in town — dentists or VR gear vendors or something — and the only rental threep I could get myself into was a janky, dented Metro Courier. 

First site walk I show up on, who’s there? My ex-girlfriend, riding a high-end threep and looking so _concerned_ about me. 

Things went downhill from there.

I started wondering if someone was out to get me, but how? The nutritional supplement bag that had gone bad was part of a big package deal I’d bought at Costco months earlier, and I’ve got security on my place. I hadn’t even had a nurse in for weeks before the bad luck started. 

I upgraded my security cameras, but they weren’t catching anything. I started recording every interaction I could, but there weren’t any clues. I even bought virtual sage, the expensive kind, from one of those Agora shops that swears it’s blessed by actual Internet monks or whatever, and walked through my liminal space, burning it and thinking positive thoughts. Nothing.

Finally, I broke down and told Sam I thought someone had put a curse on me. 

We were in his liminal space at the time. I remember, because he went pale.

“Did you copy anything from the Light of the Agora?”

“The what now?”

“That weird church-y place we found. The one with the light.”

“Uh…..”

“Because I wrote about it on my exploration blog, and my commenters had some weird stories. I ended up taking down the info.”

“I didn’t record anything,” I said. “It’s just a fucking lamp. How would they even know?”

“You have to delete it,” he said. “Right now.”

I deleted the lamp. Right away, the bad luck stopped. The nutritional supplement company reached out about compensation, my threep repair woman called to say the charging issue was fixed, and everything went back to normal.

It still bugs me, though. How the fuck did they know about that lamp?

 

**The Swarm**  
_@jenny’s_not_home_

To tell this story right, I have to tell you about my ex-boyfriend. Blake. He worked as a gig security contractor — drone swarm, non-weaponized variety, to keep him on the right side of Federal Aviation Administration regs. He had his own swarm he oversaw, and he was really into it — used to spend hours on them, attention-splitting between eighteen different views of whatever place he was hired to provide oversight and security on that week. He repaired and built all his own drones, and those suckers were customized. A couple of them had more processing power than my first threep. 

You’re probably figuring Blake was Haden, but you’d be wrong. He wasn’t. Just spent his time jacked into eight monitors. Used to tell me he envied my network, which — well, you know non-Hadens and how they can get about how “lucky” we are. He wasn’t a jerk or anything, just — didn’t think, you know?

We broke up. Not an unusual outcome for a Haden/non-Haden relationship.

It was a few weeks after our breakup when I started seeing the drones. In the distance, at first — I figured they were just package delivery or something, but package drones move by fast and then they’re gone. These drones were persistent, like someone had them following me.

I tried to chalk it up to coincidence, but a couple of them got too close one day. I gave Blake a call and asked him if he knew anything about it. He claimed he didn’t. He didn’t look too good, though. Like he hadn’t been sleeping.

The drones backed off after that — mostly.

The incident happened about a week later. 

I was in my threep, walking home from work, when I started hearing the drones again. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then they got LOUD — there must have been a hundred of them, all sizes, big, small, covered in blinking LEDs. They were swarming all around me, so thick my threep’s visual sensors couldn’t see the sky, and I started getting freaked out. The bigger drones — those rotor blades will damage even a threep. 

I yelled at them to go away, because I was so over this, you know? But then I heard a voice, from the drones.

“Go home, Jenny,” the drones said, and the voice sounded just like Blake.

I ran all the way home, as fast as my threep could go, and locked myself inside my apartment. But the drones were still out there — I could see the LEDs blinking outside my windows — so I called the cops. Enough was enough. I had everything recorded, so I figured I could get a restraining order. 

I watched the cops arrive on the building cam, so I knew they took someone into custody. The building cam’s crappy, though, so I couldn’t tell who.

That’s when the cop knocked on my door.

He showed me a badge. “Ma’am, may I come in?”

I scanned his badge and face to confirm his identity before I let him in. “It was Blake, wasn’t it? He’s had his drone swarm stalking me for weeks.”

The cop looked at me. “Ma’am, Blake was murdered three days ago.”

I couldn’t find anything to say. The cop went on to explain that Blake saw something, while he was doing security oversight. Something he wasn’t supposed to see. 

“We just apprehended the man we suspect of Blake’s murder in your building lobby,” the cop explained. “He had an EMP pulse generator and a knife. He must have thought Blake told you what he saw. If you hadn’t called us.…”

I don’t know who — or what — was riding Blake’s drones that night. But I do know one thing: if they hadn’t warned me, I’d be dead.


End file.
